In many wounds which involve injury to a significant area of human skin, and particularly in the case of massive burns, there is an immediate need to cover the wound with a material which provides some of the functions of skin. These functions involve the reduction of fluid loss, prevention of infections, and reduction of the area for potential scarring.
Approaches which have been employed in solving this problem involve the use of homografts, modified dermal xenografts, synthetic polymeric structures, or reconstituted collagen films. While each of these approaches offers partial success, each also has been replete with serious problems which have not been solved. Particularly significant problems in many of these approaches have been rejection of the skin substitute, particularly in the absence of immunosuppressive agents, or breakdown of the graft by host enzymes.